VIA KT333 Based Mainboards Roundup

When we described
the VIA's KT333 chipset we supposed that there were two possible ways of its development:
its replacement with the expected KT333A and usage of the VT8235 south bridge.
Both are not realized yet. New boards based on the KT333+VT8235 are still being
announced, but we won't see them on the market. That is why in the second part
of the comparison testing of the KT333 based mainboards we have models with equal
initial conditions coinciding with those of the boards of the first
part of the test. As to a USB 2.0, some of the today's participants have it,
even without the VT8235.

It's useless to test mainboards because the difference will
be to low to be more important than other characteristics of a board. The only
real benefit is to reveal crucial drawbacks which can be corrected, as a rule,
by flashing a new BIOS version. Putting the card before the horse, I must say
that there are no any big downsides, though the gaps between the models are noticeable.
In this connection we show only those test results which reflect such difference.

Test results

The MPEG4 encoding depends much on a memory speed, that is
why this test and the following one are the best indicators of problems in the
most critical part of operation of boards. The only remarkable result belongs
to the Abit KX7-333R - the gap is about 4% (and 6% from the outsider AOpen).

The agressive memory access in archiving makes the difference
greater: the leader's scores are 8% better than those of the AOpen's model and
Abit AT7. The Acorp's and QDI's solutions go on a par falling behind the leader
by a couple of percents.

SYSmark is a complex test of performance of office applications
which much depends on a data exchange rate with a hard drive. There is no correlation
with low-level tests but it is still interesting to compare their efficiency.
The test didn't let us down having changed the situation for an opposite one.
Well, it's like the conservation law - if anything disappears in one place, anything
will appear in another :).

Finally we turn to games, where the performance difference,
even very low, is very important, contrary to applications used in the SYSmark.
In the 3DMark the boards which work with the memory better have higher scores.

In the other games the situation is the same, the maximum differences
reaches only 3%. The Acorp's solution performs better here, which was expected
taking into account its scores in the AWadvs-04 test of the SPECviewperf packet
(we do not show data of this test because it is not very interesting from the
practical point of view), which estimates a data rate through the AGP (with the
same video card).

Conclusion

The Abit KX7-333R board turned to be the fastest one; it is
followed by the Acorp 7KT333 and QDI KuDoz 7E/333-A. On the whole, the speed results
of all the contestants are very close, that is why I do not recommend that you
choose a board according to the above scores.

This is not the first or last review of the KT333 based solutions.
There is a great deal of various boards on the market, that is why you should
first determine technical characteristics (which differ very much depending on
a board - just compare the Abit AT7 with some budget solution), read a detailed
description of the models you are interested in and you will be able to find a
solution acceptable in price and functions.

Soon we will publish the third part of the review with mainboards
from FIC and Jetway, a new series from Chaintech (which uses a so long-expected
VT8235) and something more.